UCSF Faculty Association

Dear UC Regents’ Chair Leib,

We are alarmed that the Regents have recently chosen to ignore the recommendations of the Academic Council and its systemwide Senate committees on a number of key issues. The centrality of faculty governance to the University of California is critical to maintaining its international reputation for excellence and recruiting the best scholars and teachers. It is especially concerning that the Regents have overruled their own faculty in educational matters–like admission standards, curricula questions, and academic freedom–over which faculty have greater expertise. While we consider harmful all the examples of the Regents’ interference in Senate faculty’s delegated authority and the principles of shared governance, here we are writing to address the most recent instance of the Regents substituting their wishes for the expertise of the faculty.

At your recent meetings, the Regents rejected the Academic Council’s recommendations regarding online education and testing requirements for admission. At your upcoming meeting on 20 March, two items are on your agenda where Senate committees have decisively rejected the proposals under discussion—namely, banning political statements on websites and the mathematics requirement for admission. As we have already written to you about the former, we focus here on the latter.

Academic Senate Regulations for at least the last 40 years have required freshman applicants for undergraduate admission to learn the contents of Algebra I, Geometry, and Algebra II to be eligible. Those regulations are still in effect to this day. Senate Regulation 428.C allows students to skip a required course for admission if they take a more advanced one that “assumes knowledge acquired” from the skipped course. Under this exception clause, several curricula self-labeled as “data science” were approved by the UCOP High School Articulation Unit as substituting for the Algebra II requirement in senate regulations.

However, it has become abundantly clear that several of these “data science,” and even some statistics, courses do not actually satisfy Senate Regulation 428.C since they do not “assume knowledge acquired” from Algebra II. This has been repeatedly examined and concluded by multiple parties, including by the majority of Black senate faculty across the University of California system in a letter from May 2022 concerned with equity issues (of students from underrepresented groups being funneled into courses that underprepare them), by the Systemwide Academic Preparation and Education Programs Committee of California State University in this resolution approved in March 2023 by BOARS in a unanimous July 2023 vote, and most recently in a report released by a systemwide Area C workgroup that spent an entire semester researching the matter and stated in February 2024 it “strongly supports the July 2023 BOARS decision that the three courses above do not validate Algebra II according to current Senate Regulations.” The workgroup even went further to state, “We find these current courses labeled as ‘data science’ are more akin to data literacy courses. While they may be suitable college preparatory courses for some students, they are not appropriate as recommended 4th year Mathematics courses per SR 424.” Lastly, even beyond the CSU and UC systems, industry leaders from companies such as OpenAI, Google, Meta, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and many others have applauded the recommendation of the workgroup, affirming the importance of strong mathematical foundations for future jobs in artificial intelligence.

Regents Policy 2102 and Regents Bylaw 40.1 state that the Academic Senate is responsible for determining conditions for admission, subject to approval by the Board of Regents. Though the Board has the ultimate authority to approve or disapprove Senate recommendations, it is difficult to understand why they would do so on this question of admission standards, on which they have little expertise.

We urge the Board to listen to its world-class faculty and adopt BOARS’ recommendation regarding the validation of Algebra II based on the work of the Area C workgroup.

Sincerely,

Constance Penley, CUCFA President and Professor of Film and Media Studies UC Santa Barbara

On behalf of the Council of UC Faculty Associations

Below is the letter the Council of University of California Faculty Associations sent on February 12 to the UC Regents objecting to their proposed new website policy.

Dear UC Regents,

At its meeting on January 24, the Regents proposed a new policy on the use of university administrative websites. The central aim of this Action Item J3 was to prevent schools, departments, centers and other academic units from using their websites to publicly express “the personal or collective opinions” of the faculty in case that is mistaken to represent the University’s official position. We applaud the Regents for deferring further discussion of this proposal to their next meeting, as this will enable them to consult with faculty leaders and experts in the field who consider it both an unnecessary and dangerous measure.

As documented in a report from the systemwide Senate Academic Council and its Committee on Academic Freedom, University policy “permits departments to make statements on University-owned websites, as long as those statements do not take stands on electoral politics.” UCAF explains that while the University is prohibited from taking positions on the outcomes of elections, it is not prohibited from making other political statements (and indeed often does so). The Senate Academic Council has “endorse[d] the overriding principle…that departments should not be precluded from issuing or endorsing statements in the name of the department,” noting that “freedom of expression and academic freedom are core tenets of the UC educational mission, and individual faculty members and groups of faculty have a right to speak publicly about political or controversial issues.”

CUCFA agrees with UCAF and the Academic Council that existing policy already protects the University from any legal liability and that this additional restriction is both unnecessary and dangerous. At a time when free speech and academic freedom are under threat on many campuses, the proposed policy is recklessly ambiguous. The Regents are still debating whether the new policy will apply to all websites or solely to the landing pages of department websites, and that is a huge policy difference. In failing to adequately define what constitutes a political statement, it runs the risk of serious overreach and abuse. This is all the more alarming as the policy does not specify who is responsible for its enforcement: which university office or position will be responsible for policing the policy? At their next meeting, we urge the Regents to reject this dangerously ambiguous policy as it threatens to violate the principles of faculty governance and academic freedom central to the University of California.

Sincerely,
Constance Penley, CUCFA President and Professor of Film and Media Studies, UC Santa Barbara
Wendy Matsumura, CUCFA Vice President and Associate Professor of History, UC San Diego

On behalf of the Council of UC Faculty Associations

January 30, 2024

Dear President Drake, UC Regents, Chancellor Hawgood, Provost Lucey, Dean King, and Chair Wachter,

The Council of UC Faculty Associations (CUCFA) is an umbrella organization for the Faculty Associations at each of the ten UC campuses, which advocates for the economic and employment conditions of UC faculty and faculty rights of academic freedom and political speech. We reiterate our deep alarm at the chilling climate across the United States, and on UC campuses that undermines the academic freedom and the free speech rights of instructional faculty, staff, and students to express support for the Palestinian people and/or criticize the Israeli government in any terms consistent with academic freedom, including settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and genocide.

We write today to condemn the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF)’s misleading and viciously-worded attack on their own faculty member Dr. Rupa Marya, a professor of medicine and internationally renowned expert on antiracism, health equity, and the health impacts of colonialism. Dr. Marya’s supposedly “racist conspiracy theory” was a critique of Israel’s destruction of the healthcare system in Gaza, and was a call to study the impacts of this destruction on the Palestinian people (see Dr. Marya’s personal statement giving context to her Tweet and the response to it). UCSF’s appalling actions, outlined in a petition written by her colleagues, “Protect Academic Freedom and Freedom of Speech at UCSF,” have exacerbated the harassment that Dr. Marya had been on the receiving end of since California Senator Scott Wiener reposted a post critical of Dr. Marya and accused her of antisemitism. Hundreds of people reposted Wiener’s post and tagged Canary Mission. As a result, Marya was doxxed and received multiple death threats. It is unconscionable that following these attacks, UCSF did not condemn Wiener and Canary Mission, but rather used its own social media accounts to share its own defamatory statement, which rapidly spread across multiple social media platforms. These attacks by UCSF leadership against a respected member of the community for their antiracist and decolonial post send a chilling message to faculty, students, staff, patients, and community members. It also obstructs faculty members’ right to academic freedom and all community members’ constitutional right to freedom of speech.

We call for an immediate retraction of your defamatory statement and a public reaffirmation of UCSF’s commitment to free speech that safeguards academic freedom. It is fully within Dr. Marya’s rights to express any political position on a post and to share her academic work. CUCFA condemns UCSF’s institutional response that mobilized an antisemitic trope like that of the “conspiracy theory” levied against her. We demand an end to the “Palestine Exception” to academic freedom and free speech. UC System Provost, Katherine S. Newman’s statement, “We count on the disciplinary expertise of our faculty to develop the methods, substantive scholarly work, peer review, and vigorous debate that makes universities such an essential resource for evaluating difficult and contentious issues of contemporary and historical importance” must apply to all.

Finally, in light of the upcoming Board of Regents meeting where the Regents will deliberate their disciplinary powers over faculty (now apparently planned to occur at the March meeting), an issue CUCFA views as an unprecedented and alarming threat to UC’s educational mission. We remind you that shared governance implies that the Academic Senate, notably Privilege and Tenure, have purview over disciplinary processes. Laid out in the Senate bylaws and APM 15, faculty control over faculty disciplinary processes is fundamental to the conditions of our employment and is thus a core CUCFA issue.

Sincerely,

Constance Penley, CUCFA President and Professor of Film and Media Studies, UC Santa Barbara
Wendy Matsumura, CUCFA Vice President and Associate Professor of History, UC San Diego

On behalf of the Council of UC Faculty Associations